Telephone numbers typically represent one of the primary ways an individual can communicate with another person or an organization such as a business or governmental agency. As telephone numbers have continued to pervade every aspect of modern life, entities (particularly businesses) often attempt to acquire a phone number that is easy to remember. One common way to make a phone number more memorable is to have the number correspond to letters, or alphabetic characters, that correspond to words or acronyms. Example phone numbers would include 800-GO-FEDEX, 800-IBM-HELP, 800-PICK-UPS, and many others. Each letter in a phone number corresponds to a number on a standard keypad for a phone. The letters ‘A’, ‘C’, for example, correspond to the number ‘2’ on a standard keypad, ‘D’, ‘E’, and ‘F’ correspond to the number ‘3’, and so on. Particularly for an organization that desires to have its phone number remembered by a large number of existing or potential customers, alphabetical-based phone numbers are considered more memorable, and thus potentially more valuable, than pure numerical phone numbers.
While alphabetic phone numbers are easier to remember for many people, they often prove more difficult to dial than traditional numbers (i.e., phone numbers that consist entirely of numbers). A user attempting to dial an alphabetic-based phone number must translate, or map, each letter in the phone number to an appropriate number. Traditionally, phone keypads have letters listed on the appropriate numbers of the keypad. A user of one of these phones would need to look at the keypad to find each letter and then press the number associated with the letter, a process which may significantly add to the time and complexity of dialing the phone number and thus reduces user satisfaction. Moreover, a user attempting to translate letters into numbers is likely to become more distracted, a problem which can be exacerbated if the user is also performing another task simultaneously, such as driving. Many modern phones that have small keypads to reduce the overall size of the phone (particularly with many cell phones or other mobile phones) remove the letter/number translation entirely or provide, printing that is so small that it is not easily readable.
One solution to this problem is for organizations or others to refrain from using alphabetic phone numbers, but such a solution negates the established advantages of alphabetic numbers. Another solution would be for users that have phones with voice recognition dialing to program an alias for the alphabetic phone number they would like to call. For this solution, the user may train the cell phone, for example, that the spoken words ‘IBM Help’ should cause the phone to dial 1-800-IBM-Help. Such a solution, however, fails to provide flexibility for a user and forces users to program each alias they wish to set up for alphabetic (or other) numbers. This solution accordingly is inefficient as the user is forced to manually create the aliases and cannot quickly respond to new alphabetic phone numbers that they wish to dial. In addition, most phones with voice recognition dialing also have a limit on the number of aliases available, forcing the user to use valuable alias capability for alphabetic phone numbers. There is, therefore, a need for an effective and efficient solution for dialing alphabetic phone numbers.